Halloween Wedding

Over the Halloween weekend, we were invited to Sierra & Nick's wedding in Essex Junction, VT. Here is a random collection of photos from  wandering around Burlington downtown, the wedding reception, and the trick-or-treating right afterwards.

A few days before this, I received the 90mm Summicron lens for my Leica M3. This lens was made in 1959 in Canada and I got it at a reasonable price from a guy in Portugal. So naturally I was excited to try it out. All photos taken with the Leica M3 on either Kodak Portra 400 color negative or Ilford Delta 3200 black&white film.

Super-Sized Sprocket Hole Photography

It's fall in New England and rather easy to find some nice scenery for taking photos. Though this time I decided to experiment and complicate things a bit. I wanted to include the film's sprocket holes as part of the picture area to achieve some nice framing effect. That's typically done by loading 35mm film into a medium format camera. So I found some 135 to 120 film format adapters on eBay that let me do that. Though then I also wanted to get as much of a panoramic effect as possible. That means my 6x6 medium format camera wasn't quite up to the task.

I happen to have a 6x9 roll film back for my Graflex Super Graphic large format camera. So the final setup was: Kodak Ektar 35mm film in a 120 film adapter in a 6x9 roll film back attached to a 4x5 large format camera! The nice thing about this is that I can shoot panoramic images with sprocket holes. And I can also use the front standard movement of the Super Graphic camera to move the focus plane to where I need it. I typically used front tilt to get both the foreground and background elements in focus.

As shown on the setup photo above, I created templates for both the ground glass and the "sports finder" of the camera to show me the actual area of the image.

Below are my favorites from the one roll of film I shot last Sunday while exploring some conservation land areas in Andover, MA.

Hersheypark

Photos from our August 2015 family trip to Hersheypark and Gifford Pinchot State Park in Pennsylvania. All taken with my father's old Mamiya C330 medium format camera and Ilford HP5 Plus black&white film.

Supermoon Lunar Eclipse 2015

The moon next to the Phillips Academy Memorial Bell Tower in Andover, MA. Before, during and after the total eclipse.

Stars and Stripes

Some more black & white photos taken with the Leica. From the 2015 Independence Day events in Andover and Boston, MA.

Disney in Black & White

For a Disney World vacation in March 2015, I decided to change things up a bit and photograph the whole trip in black & white film, using the family heirloom Leica M3 camera recently given to me. It's a fully mechanical camera from the early 1960s with not even a built-in light meter, so it's nice not having to worry about charging batteries. Though of course I did have to worry about changing films. And I must say the M3 isn't really an ergonomic masterpiece when it comes to that. Nevertheless, it was a fun experience.

All photos taken with the 50mm Summicron lens on Ilford HP5 PLUS film.

A New(?) Beginning

To get started, I have transferred my adventure travel photo galleries from the old Web site pretty much unchanged. The Greenland and Korea photos were all shot on slide film. For the 2004 India business trip, I used one of my first digital cameras: a Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2. And the Tanzania, Chile and Alaska trips were all shot with a Canon 20D digital SLR. Except I didn't quite trust this newfangled technology back in 2004 and had a backup EOS film camera that I used for a few photos in Tanzania.

New Web Hosting Comany

After many years of non-use, I decided to move my Web site to a new hosting provider: Squarespace. There was nothing really wrong with the previous one. But it required all manual Web page design. With the easy editing features that Squarespace provides, I'm hoping there is now less excuse for not adding new content once in a while...